


Theory of Relativity

by Dangereuse



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Far far far off future fic, Faux Science, I am an engineer but I will NEGLECT THE PHYSICAL LAWS AT MY WHIMS, IS THE BEST SCIENCE, M/M, PENGUINS IN SPACE, SPACE HISTORIAN FTW, Sid the astroarcheologist, yes - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3464537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dangereuse/pseuds/Dangereuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sid's spent his entire life scouring history books for even the briefest mentions of the ancient spacestations early Earth spacetravelers left behind as perfectly preserved historical sites in the stars. When he finally gets funding from his university to take a small three-person team up to discover the remains of a spacestation in Quadrant 3, he can't imagine what these past civilizations left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Coming about 1.47 degrees off course,” Duper calls out, his fingers sliding over the display.

Flower whistles as he floats into position in front of his console. “Nice. Don’t tell the boys back in mission control that they got us so close on the first try, or I’ll be out of a job.”

Sid feels the corners of his mouth turn up. He doubts it. Flower’s the best damn navigator the university has. Sid’s really fucking lucky he decided to retire from the fleet for a taste of civilian life. “Adjust course. Bring us in slow. Let’s not make contact with the vessel. Who knows what kind of substandard shielding our ancestors used on their stations. Duper, can you give us a visual on the station?”

Duper makes a little sound of agreement in the back of his throat, before he pushes off his console and locks his feet crossed under his body to float over to the viewscreen.

Sid can feel their shuttlecraft slowing around them as Flower brings them in gentle, but he’s attention is caught on the image on the viewscreen.

It’s an archaic spacestation, nearly two hundred years old. It’s huge, dominating the entirety of their viewscreen with the dull greys and browns of old Earth cement and ceramics, and rare glints of highly valuable copper and other metals that stopped being naturally occurring on Sid’s planet long ago. Sid can see where the sides are pitted and marred by a hundred years of space debris, the damage hiding the sturdy, if quaint construction of their ancestors.

It’s a priceless glimpse into the history of their past. Sid runs a scan of the ship on his own console with shaking fingers. Sid almost can’t believe he’s here, that he convinced his superiors of the worth of examining this forgotten structure, that the mission to come out here and look at and study this huge and ancient relic of another time was important. Good thing he spent so much of his undergrad babysitting the Head of the Department’s kids.

“Preliminary scans indicate that the spacestation hasn’t developed any structural leaks into space,” Sid reports. “We should be able to hook her up to the enviro generator as planned.”

Duper grabs a copy of the spacestation off the viewscreen and drags it to his own console, rotating it with a flick of his fingers. “I don’t know. I’ll want to take a look at the pitting on her portside bow. It looks like I might have to seal that before we go in. It’s obvious that she’s experienced heavy damage there, and the enviro generator might initiate enough of pressure differential that the old gal will break apart at the terraforming. And it can’t hurt to send someone out to do a more thorough check as soon as we come along beside her.

Sid nods, biting down his excitement. “Can we get a name on her?”

“I haven’t seen anything yet, although we haven’t done a complete orbit.”

Sid reminds himself that a complete orbit is still unlikely to retrieve results. Preliminary dating of this historical site lends for a construction in the early 2000’s. Space travel was possible then, but causal space vessels were not present, and likely never conceived of. There would be little reason for this space vessel to carry a name on the hull, or a chip designed to broadcast the spacestation’s identity for passing ships to identify.

Incomplete historical records pieced together from the Empire and Sid’s contact at one of their leading universities had indicated that this vessel could possibly be the International Space Station, launched into orbit way back in 1998, or the _Firebird,_ deployed later in 2070.

“Fifty fractions says that this is the _ISS”,_ Flower calls out.

Sid smiles. Sid himself suspects this station to be the _Firebird,_ but into orbit in 2070 as a failed wartime effort by the country then known as Russia to conduct scientific experiments and discreet surveillance on their rivals, the United Federation of Free States.

“Deal. It’s the _Firebird.”_ Sid calls.

Duper shakes his head. “You’re crazy.”

Flower scoffs. “Sid’s biased. He just wants it to be the _Firebird_ after he traded Semin for the video clips from their exercise regimen. He’s got a crush on that one guy. You know.”

Sid groans, and fights the urge to bury his face in his console as he cheeks flush a violent red. He’d been exchanging small, insignificant data about this region with Semin from a sister university in Empire space, after the Communications Embargo had been lifted, and Semin had sent him an old 2D video of the _Firebird’s_ early space exploration regimen. Flower had just happened to walk in on Sid when one of the astronauts had been doing back strength exercises in some flimsy old-Earth clothing, his…equipment bouncing freely under the loose shorts.

There had been no end to the chirping. Flower knew Sid’s— _preferences—_ and no amount of protestations that he was examining old Earth exercise equipment for his next historical article would silence him.

Duper chuckles. “Yeah, no. Sorry, Flower. I’m not going up against Sid when it comes to analysis of early space vessels. He's the only one of us with a doctorate in Archaic Spacetravel.”

***

A full rotation around the spacestation had indeed revealed a bright red name spray-painted in an old strange script, blockier and with less variation in size of the characters than Standard. Sid had barely recognized it as a tongue, only the color differentiating the strange characters from dull grey ceramic hull of the spacestation.

Sid currently has the translator running a photo of the script for a positive identification for language and period dialect. If they get a match to language, era and dialect, they can program their handheld devices for instant translation of the archaic language, which would make investigation of the spacestation infinitely easier.

It should get a match. Sid’s spent too much time ripping old text from ancient Russian paper documents and hideously slow and poorly preserved servers from the 2000’s for the translator not to find one.

“I’ve only noticed one major structural instability in the hull.” Duper reports in. “Nothing like the damage I was expecting coming off the major storm from last week that mission control reported.”

Sid shakes his head. “I’m not sure that debris field even exists. It might just be Empire propaganda.”

Flower nodded. “Possible.”

Duper shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t care, as long as it makes repair easy for me.”

***  
“How are you guys doing out there?” Flower calls over the comm system. Visibility is poor, small dusty particles still lingering from a debris field that coursed through the area before they arrived, and Flower can’t see anything from them but the life signals from Sid and Duper’s space suits on the holoscreen. He’s been checking in twice as frequently to compensate.

“Pretty good. I think this is the last patch,” Sid reports. The new polyconcrete reinforcements he and Duper have been putting all over the _Firebird’s_ hull are freezing properly over the cracks and structural weak points, and Sid uses the rapidly drying stuff to put his space program ident, 87, on the hull with the leftovers. Maybe someday future historians will analyze him, as he hopes to do with the _Firebird._

“Yeah,” Duper calls, from behind one of the stations hulking solar panels, “I’ve almost got the enviro generator integrated into the existing life support systems. I’m flushing the existing air content now. I think we can initiate the system once we get back on board, get us a nice 70-30 nitrox mix going in there.”

Sid forces his excitement down, making his voice nice and even. Tomorrow it’ll be safe to board this ancient space vessel. Tomorrow Sid will be able to investigate this historical site and see whether or not his thesis is correct about this little space vessel. “Great. Patching is complete.”

“You can do a little celebration celly if you want. We all know just how long you’ve wanted to break into this hulk.” Flower calls over the line. “I won’t be able to record it through all this dust.”

“Ha ha, Flower.”

“Oh. Mission control wants to talk to you. They won’t talk to me. Did you schedule a private call with Mario?”

“No?” Sid asked. “What priority is it?”

“P3.”

Sid frowns. “Well, they’re not going to cut our funding while we’re already out here. Patch it through to my suit.”

“Already got them queued on line 2.” Sid rolls his eyes and dutifully turns over the transmission. “Crosby, Ident Number 8787, responding back to Mission Control.”

“Dr. Crosby. This is Bettman at Mission Control.” The voice was different in his ear. Usually Sid’s conversations went through Mario Lemieux, his mentor and the astroarcheologist that first inspired Sid into historical space exploration, or his wife, Natalie, whose treatise on dating historical sites subject to aging under space relativity conditions was standard for their field.

“We’ve been informed the latest weather data in your area is subject to a two-point-three-four standardized spaceday delay. A conversion error was detected during analysis of weather data taken from your sector of space. All weather data from your mission should be taken from estimated values from two spacedays previous.”

“What?”

The voice grew irritated and condescending. “It’s easy enough. Your weather data is two spacedays late. To get accurate weather data, simply look at the weather data in your section from two days ago.”

“Our mission was delayed two spacedays to avoid an immense debris field suspected to be in the area.” Sid bit out. Four months ago, the Empire had blown up an asteroid before it could collide with one of their populated worlds. The asteroid, blown into small pieces, would eventually reform, drawn together inexorably by the asteroid’s center of mass, but until reformation the debris field generated would safely pass over heavily shielded areas. Say, planets with habitable atmospheres. Deep space military bases.

Not small exploratory space modules deployed for historical fact gathering. Not archaic spacestations constructed a several hundred years ago. Not two men in spacesuits performing repairs to said archaic spacestations.

“Not my problem. All I was told to do was report the problem. If you need to file a complaint with the department, it’s not my area. Have a nice day.” The voice cut out.

“Fuck me.” Sid yelled, swapping back over to intersuit communications. “Duper, we need to evacuate right the fuck now. Get back to the ship as soon as possible. This isn’t dust from the tail end of the debris field, this is barely the beginning. Flower, what have we got on long range sensors?”

“All I’m picking up is the fuckton of dust, Sid. I’ve got nothing. I’m trying to reset the sensors to get a clearer picture, but I thought we were out of the woods with this.”

“Sid, I need to finish up the connections with the enviro gen, otherwise it’ll come loose.”

“How long will that take?”

“Another fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Fuck.” If they couldn’t board the spacestation, there would be no data to collect, nothing to show for having come all this way.

“We haven’t noted an increase in particle size in the past half hour,” Flower offers.

“Ok Duper. Try and get her hooked up.”

***

It doesn’t take twenty minutes for everything to go to shit. It doesn’t even take ten.

The dust is thick now, almost pressing against the clear plastic of their face plates, cutting their previous poor visibility in half and making claustrophobia curl up, insidious, against Sid’s spine. Thick rocks are rolling in, hulking threats capable of crushing him and his suit popping in and out of Sid’s frame of visibility. They’re moving fast, velocity unchecked from the moment they were torn free from the main body of the asteroid.

“How close are we to completion?” Sid ventures. He knows it’s not time to ride Duper, not when he’s putting the finishing touches on the enviro gen, but he just saw a chuck of wrecked asteroid bigger than him speed past. Sid watches Duper steady hands moving as fast as they can through the sealed plexifield with impatience. It’s delicate work, unsuited for the thick thermal insulated gloves of their suits, and it’s taking too long.

“Done.” The side of Duper’s mouth crooks up. “About time, eh?” Sid forces his own lips to return the smile.

“Flower, we’re coming in.”

“Finally, assholes. I’ve got the air lock ready for you.”

It’s not enough. As soon as Sid and Duper orient themselves out of the shadow of the ancient spacestation, their suits echoing with the pitter-patter of tiny rocks striking over and over.

“Fuck,” Sid hears over the comms, hushed and pained, and then, once Duper realizes their connection is still open, a rueful, “The big ones hurt.”

Sid grunts in agreement, but it’s too hard to talk, trying to navigate himself back to the ship with his body curled up as best he can against the endless pressure of more and more rocks.

It’s the work of scant minutes to come alongside the _Penguin,_ but even that bare amount of time is enough for Sid to start worrying about the structural integrity of their suits, the sharp scraping edges of so much debris on a plastimerfabric intended for the empty vacuum of nothing.

Duper comes alongside him as Sid anchors himself next to the airlock, and Sid can hear his labored breathing. “I’ve been hit a couple times,” he pants, and Sid can’t bear to tear his face away from where he’s queuing up the open sequence to look at his face.

“Let’s get you through first, ok,” Sid calls, and it’s an eternity to watch the plexifield of the air lock grow, to generate enough of an environment for a clean room to admit Duper and him inside. It’s a small field, only admitting one man at a time to prevent excess energy loss.

Duper pants, and Sid knows that something is really wrong when all he gets out is a small grunt, an approximation of the word “Fine.”

Sid jerks his head around to Duper. His face is pale, and Sid can see large beads of sweat on his face that the water-recyc unit can’t manage to wick away fast enough.

“Ok, ok, it’ll just be a minute.” Sid breathes out, and miracle of miracles, the chime for the little plexifield clean room rings, jerking Sid’s gaze back to the screen. “Go on through.”

Sid expects to see Duper slide forward, to see him slide through the plexifield barrier as if it’s butter, to board the ship, but there’s nothing.

Sid can’t even hear Duper’s raspy breaths over the line. When Sid turns his head, Duper’s eyes are closed, his upper body angling almost out of the small barrier the angles of the _Penguin_ have given him, as if he’s no longer controlling the positioning of his suit.

“Fuck me,” Sid breathes out, and—

“Duper’s passed out, Flower!” Sid’s gloved hands scrabble on Duper’s body, trying to catch a handhold on the super slick material. The suit wasn’t made for dexterity, and it shows, as Sid’s fingers slide over Duper’s legs and feet without catching. There’s a handhold on the suit, for situations like this, but it’s located on the back of the neck and Sid can’t reach from this position.

He finally manages to get a grasp on Duper’s ankle with both hands, pulling Duper’s body towards him in a big heave.

“I’m still getting life signs,” Flower returns, solemn and calm. “Says he’s still in there.”

“Ok, yeah.” Sid takes a deep breath, tries not to think. Duper’s body is slow to move, hard to angle, but he slides effortlessly once Sid gets him to move in this goddamn frictionless vacuum. It’s too quiet, and Sid still can’t hear his breath.

“I’m, uh, I’m sending him through.” The little plexifield takes Duper, embracing him easy, and Sid nearly sighs in relief when the little indicator light goes occupied-yellow, signifying the plexifield’s hardened and is initiating transport through to the ship itself.

It’s how he doesn’t see the huge fucking rock that makes it under the _Penguin’s_ overhang and sends him crashing face first into the plexifield.


	2. Chapter 2

Sid comes to with Flower’s voice in his ears, tinny and panicked. “Sid! Sid! You hear me?!? Sid!”

Sid can’t help the huge groan that passes through his lips. The pain in his head is so bad for a second Sid can’t even feel it, just a seething morass of white hot nausea building up between his eyes and lips, making him wonder about the feasibility of vomiting into his suit. “I’m here.”

Flower sighs in relief over the comm. “Tabernaq. Sid. You’ve been out for fifteen minutes.”

Sid tries to open his eyes to look around him, orient himself. All he sees is a million stars piercing through a shroud of dust, too bright, too close, beaming into his face shield like daggers. Sid dry retches.

“Sid?”

“Did you get Duper on board?” Sid asks. The nausea is a thick pressure in his throat and Sid relaxes his into the achey pain of squeezing his eyes shut.

“Yeah. He’s hooked into the medpod.”

“Yeah?”

Flower hesitates. “It doesn’t look very good.”

“What?”

Sid can hear the hitch in Flower’s breath, the wet thickness that means Flower’s choking back tears. “He hasn’t woken up. Medstats say he collapsed one of his lungs and has a bleed in the other. The medpod can’t fix him. It wants me to set a course home.”

“Ok. Yeah.” The news doesn’t mean anything. Sid can’t imagine getting funding for a mission like this again, but Sid can’t even think of anything but the photo Duper proudly shows Sid at any opportunity, of Carol-Lyn and his kids. Sid risks a glimpse of the starry expanse again, before slamming his lids shut again in pain.

“Ok,” Sid sighs. He doesn’t know he can concentrate right now. Not and not end up like Duper, passed out in his suit. Not and open his eyes.

“Are you hurt, Sid?”

Sid takes a deep breath and lies. “I don’t think so. Just knocked around. Frankly I’m just fucking scared of being crushed to death.” Sid makes his voice dry, his joke morbid.

Flower chuckles, just like Sid thought he would. “Sid, you’re fucking crazy when it comes to space. You gonna let some baby asteroids get the better of you?”

“Nah.” Sid swallows, forces his eyes to slit open. It’s like a million fucking knives in his skull, but Sid thinks if he just gets himself angled right, gives himself enough a little push, his momentum will carry him and he’ll just be able to wedge himself up against the airlock. If he doesn’t get crushed by another fucking rock.

All in all, Sid thought there would be a lot less rock in space. Vacuum and all.

“Heading over.”

It’s a minor miracle when Sid makes it back up against the airlock without hurling in his suit. Still, the echoing pitter-patter of the rocks feels like it’s magnified tenfold, echoing in his ears and making him want to flinch over and over in the tiny space of his suit.

The little green indicator light on the airlock is red. Sid tries poking at it with clumsy fingers, before he just slaps his hand down over the whole device in frustration.

“Flower, have you got the port open on your side? I’ve got the red over here.”

“I never closed it. I didn’t know if your comms were damaged or if you were out, and I wanted to make sure you could get back in.”

“Turn it off and then back on.”

Nothing happens. Fifteen minutes passing still leaves Sid on the vastness of space side of his airlock.

“You tried the manual override?” At this point, Sid isn’t especially sure he’s keeping the pain out of his voice, but his panic feels like it’s far away.

Flower however, isn’t managing to do the same. “Yes, Sid. I tried twice. Nothing. It says it’s open.”

Sidney tries to squint down at the innards of the airlock on his side. All he has is his handheld and the multitool that comes standard in the left pantleg of his spacesuit for emergencies. Duper had the tools, Duper had been integrating the enviro gen. Sid had just been placing the automated polyconcrete packets where he needed to. Everything is just so ridiculously tiny he can’t see much of it, the circuits on the scale of femtometers, and he has the handheld for magnification and schematics, but he can only do so much with both when he’s prodding in console’s innards with such a crude tool.

Sid ends up putting it back together, and when the little indicator chimes, Sid almost sighs in relief.

Until the error message downloads from it to the inside of his face shield.

“Flower, finally got an error message.” It’s a small step forward and he’ll take it.

“Read it off to me, I’ve got the manual running.”

“Error FK3D.”

Flower pauses on his side. “Nothing specific. Just the general ‘Needs maintenance, see mechanic.’”

“Duper still out?” Sid asks, biting on his lip.

“Yeah,” Flower’s voice is quiet. “Medpod put him in stasis. He’s not supposed to wake up until he can get immediate medical attention.”

“Ok, ok,” Sid breathes out. “Lemme try something else.”

Except another thirty minutes pass and Sid figures out nothing except exactly what is wrong with the airlock.

Sid rests his head against the hull of the _Penguin._ His head is pounding now, and the pressure against his face shield helps him concentrate a little better. “It’s the molecular synthesizer.” Sid takes a deep breath. Cherishes it. Holds it in his lungs for a long saturated moment.

“What?”

“The airlock can’t generate the atmospheric molecules to pressurize the plexifield. The airlock won’t open without it.”

“Can we get override it manually?”

Sid laughs, and it’s a little harsh and a little cold, and it makes Sid’s mouth dry. “If we want the _Penguin_ to try and pressure-equalize the entirety of space.” Euphemism. More like get the _Penguin_ blown apart from the stress.

“Do I need to wake Duper?” Flower whispers.

“I don’t think even Duper can fix this, Marc. He’d have to be outside. And he’d have to have a hell of a lot more equipment than a small university-funded exploratory vessel has.”

It’s too quiet. Too quiet for the comms and too quiet for the debris field and too quiet for the vastness of space.

Sid breaks it. “Flower, there’s two of you onboard.”

“Sid no, don’t you dare.”

Sid closes his eyes, and the relief is almost immediate, dulling the sharp pounding of his head into a dull aching. “We finished the enviro integration on the _Firebird_ .”

“Fuck you, Sid. There’s no way.”

Sid repeats himself. “We finished the enviro integration on the _Firebird._ I can hang out there for a while. Two weeks, maybe three, depending on what systems I can get booted up over there.”

“I am not fucking marooning you on that godforsaken space relic so you can starve to death slowly.”

“You’re not marooning me. Flower, look.” Sid keeps his voice calm, even though he doesn’t feel it. “The _Firebird_ is still habitable. The suit gives me a whole week of water, alone. We know the _Firebird_ was shut down quickly back in 2077, and they didn’t take anything back with them. Remember? There’s got to be a lot of shit left in there.”

Flower is silent, but Sid knows he hasn’t won, not by a long shot. “You can send a messages home requiring a pick up for me. I can last long enough for that. And I probably won’t have to. There’s got to be ships passing by.”

“Not from the Alliance. You know this piece of space is far out, too close to the original Earth.”

“It doesn’t matter if I get picked up from the Empire as long as I get picked up.”

“Bullshit.”

It was time to hit hard and low. “Do you want to tell Carol-Lyn what happened? Do you want to tell her you let her husband die while you whiled away his last hours waiting for me to die outside your airlock? I can’t get inside, Flower.”

“Sid,” Flower says, and Sid both knows that he went too far and just far enough.

***  
Even though it’s his decision, and he can still connect with Flower over the comms if he wants to, it fucking hurts to see the _Penguin_ get ready for a swift departure.

The _Firebird_ opens for him easy. Sid never suspected otherwise. It’s Duper’s work, after all, and Duper’s got fucking soft hands when it comes to tech.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, the science got away for me on this one, so some of the science in this fic is in the comments at the end of this fic, for clarification, just in case you want to know more.

“Holy shit,” Sid can’t help but breathe out, the second he steps inside the _Firebird_. “Holy fucking shit!” He’s just in what looks like a corridor, steel walls painted obnoxiously white, but he’s inside the fucking _Firebird._

 

Sid lets himself lean up against the bulkhead for a moment, trying to take deep breaths in. It feels like his face shield is too small, and he can’t get enough air, and welp, they’re in this mess because of that damn enviro gen, no time like the present.

 

Sid takes off the face shield with shaky fingers and takes a deep breath. He can smell the coldness of space in the faint scent of raspberries and meat coming off of his suit, the barest synthetic vanillin scent conferred by the enviro gen, and then the spaceship, underneath that, carrying notes of cold metal and, subtle under it all—.

 

Sid wrinkles his nose. Ok. Apparently even the cold reaches of space haven’t managed to completely delay decomposition. No doubt the early astronaut phage clean rooms and containment facilities weren’t very advanced, letting endosporic bacteria on the ship on and within the astronaut’s bodies.

 

It’s _fascinating_. Sid will have to take as many samples of the bacteria as he can before the newly reinforced oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere manages to kill them. Oh God, Natalie will be so excited when Sid gives her the samples, so she can put together a realistic timeframe of bioorganism reclamation in space environments.

 

Samples. That Sid would take with his sampling kit. The one on the _Penguin._

 

Well fuck. There goes that.

 

Sid looks down at his gloved hands. He can’t realistically keep them on the whole time he’s here, despite what damage it could possibly do. Sid pulls off one glove, and before he can make himself think about it too hard, he lays his hand, _bare,_ up against the bulkhead.

 

Sid can’t help the scandalized giggle he lets out. Fuck. He’s actually on the _Firebird_.

 

***

 

The _Firebird_ is even bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside, and it’s an actual marvel that early humans were able to build something so big with their old technology. It’s really something. Sid’s been on bigger, but not in a long time, and that’s different when he’s in this historical marvel.

 

It’s not long before the ringing of Sid’s head makes him a little turned around. Sid’s not entirely sure where he is on this ship, and the _Firebird_ doesn’t have the magnetic docking systems on the walls like the _Penguin_ for Sid’s boots to adhere to. He’s got to push himself around, making sure he’s given himself enough momentum to get from wall to wall.

 

So far he’s found what he suspects to be an early laboratory and whole walls of machinery that Sid hasn’t quite figured out its use. All the machinery is so _large_ , and each inch of conceivable space is filled with fold outs and drawers and sliding covers. Sid frankly doesn’t know what’s safe to touch, and what’s not.

 

He really should have pushed Semin harder for some blueprints of the _Firebird,_ but eventually it won’t matter. He’s got his handheld whirring, taking dimensions of each room he wanders into and taking preliminary photographs.

 

It’s a minor miracle that most things have at least some rudimentary labeling.

 

***

 

“Please work,” Sid pleads as he connects the ripped out innards of the spacecraft’s comms station with his communicator. The handheld has an impressive battery, but it’s not strong enough to keep him in contact with Flower’s transmissions, much too weak to attempt contact with his own mission control, and doesn’t enough juice for him to send out intermittent signals into free space, one of which might get picked up by some of the Empire’s periodic cargo ships headed out to the Wastes.  The station itself, though, has some not inconsiderable power banks remaining, power leftover from when the station was evacuated and it was deemed too much time and effort to bring the half depleted power cells back home.  If he can piggyback off the existing comms system, he could broadcast his distress signal for a lot farther and lot longer. He’s got a pre-recorded distress call he’s set on repeat. But if this try doesn’t work, Sid’s going to have to break and see if he can find some one of the space stations food supplies and see if they were still edible.

 

“Motherfucker.” Sid exhales out when he can’t get the tech to connect for the fifth time. The station is old enough that it has some sort of primitive copper wiring, and Sid hasn’t seen this sort of electrical work outside a museum. He lets himself close his eyes, to stop the swimming.

 

“I’m hurt! Very rude for you to say! I’m not do anything to your mother, although I’m sure she charming lady.”

 

Sid flinches in surprise, before gasping in relief. “Oh my God, can you hear me?” This is…great news. He hadn’t thought he would contact anyone anytime soon, and especially not this soon, not this early.

 

“Yes. Hear you very loud, very clear. You very lucky I’m speak English.”

 

Sid frowns. English? How old is the Empire’s data on them? That’s old terminology, politically incorrect after the passing of the old regime.

 

“Are you from the Empire?” Sid asks.

 

There’s a pause. “I’m suppose you could say that.” The voice sounds amused.

 

Sid frowns. “What is that supposed to mean?”

 

The voice laughs, lowly. “There is transmission come across space to the _Валентина_ , from most strange place, on very old space station. Message say Sidney Crosby, abandoned cosmonaut, need pick up.” There’s an amused humming over the line. “The _Валентина_ very nice ship. Very new, very sleek.” A pause. “Very sneaky. ”

 

“Oh.” Sid says, confused for a moment, before it hits. “ _Oh_.”

 

Whoever this is, is bound to secrecy. He can’t say his location, can’t confirm the personnel aboard. “ _Oh._ I, um, appreciate that you guys are willing to go out of your way like this then.” Sid’s kind of surprised they’re coming by to pick him up. If the ship is here for what he thinks it’s here for, then it’s a surprise that they’re willing to reveal their presence and come pick him up at all.

 

Then again, it gives them a perfect excuse to be in Alliance space that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

 

“No problem,” It’s an easy dismissal, as if who knows how many tons of cutting edge military space technology aren’t being rerouted to come rescue Sid’s ass. “Of course come. Distress message very cute. ‘ _If convenient, please come for pick up at ‘_ Firebird’. _Have own suit for vessel evacuation’_. Have to see if cosmonaut as cute as message.”

 

Sid flushes. “Thanks, I guess.” Sid combs his hair back where his curls have curled in his own perspiration on his forehead, even though he knows he’s not transmitting visuals. “Um, is there something I can call you?”

 

“Call me Geno. Easy for tongue to say.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> During times of environmental distress, some bacteria are so fucking badass that they convert their bodies into nearly indistructible little hibernating spheres called endospores. The first space mission back from the moon, scientists swabbed the outside of the returning space pods after reentry, and found small bacteria endospores on them. First they thought they were bacteria from the moon, but then scientists soon discovered that nope, they were simply endospores from earth, that survived both the coldness and vastness of space in their endospore forms, but also the intense heat of reentry. Talk about persistent 'bug'gers. 
> 
> Additionally, I theorized as to whether or not there would be significant decomposition in the space station and I think yes. The ISS currently has a lot of antifungal and antibacterial defenses for the bugs that hitchhike into space on human bodies. Who knows what could have grown on a space ship in that time. Additionally, a lot of bugs that are used for decomposition are called anaerobes, which basically means that they 'breathe' (produce/use energy) with other things than oxygen. A lot of them are obligate or tolerant anaerobes, which means that they not only don't use oxygen, but they don't live well in it and/or it flat out kills them. (Ask me if you want to hear more about this, because the story of aerobic bacteria global supremacy is quite intense and involves both biowarfare and senseless genocide).
> 
> Phage is just anothe word for bacteria/fungal agent.
> 
> Astronauts have commented after coming back on board their spaceship after being in space, that their suits smelled of raspberries and burnt meat. Yum. Makes me hungry. 
> 
> Denizens of the ISS say that the space station smells like a machine shop and prepackaged roast beef. Also Yum. :(
> 
> Валентина is Valentina Tereshkova, which was the name of the first Russian woman in space! Yay for awesome ladies! She logged almost 3 whole days in space, and she originally got the job because she was a tough-as-nails parachuter.

**Author's Note:**

> If someone wants to argue fake science with me, BRING IT. Holy shit, the amount of time I have spent imagining the stupid fucking fake science in this is really dumb, and it's all based off all the science I know. If anyone knows any reason something I made up is fucking stupid AND can tell me why, please do. I love this shit.
> 
> Also, tumblr: http://spacecadetsidney.tumblr.com/


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